Growing Vegetables In A Small Garden Space
Most people think of a vegetable garden as a fairly large plot of land with rows stretching 15 or 20 feet each. The idea of a small container or tiny patch of land growing a viable vegetable garden seems foreign.
Yet growing vegetables in cramped spaces is not only possible but highly rewarding. One can grow tomatoes in tubs at the edge of a patio, strawberries in empty milk cartons on a windowsill, lettuce in a modest window box, watermelons along a strip beside a driveway or beans on a trellis on a small apartment balcony.
A year-long harvest of several kinds of vegetables can be gained from a single area no wider than a card table. To achieve this kind of bounty in lap-sized spaces it is necessary merely to provide the right growing conditions and to purchase seed varieties that are appropriate for small-scale circumstances.
Many seed companies have started offering miniature, compact plants to meet the needs of people with limited space. You’ll often find them in their catalogs or on their websites under categories like space miser, midgets or space savers.
Growing vegetables in a smaller space is different from growing other things in the same space. Plants like rhododendrons, heathers or miniature bulbs are grown mainly for their appearance. They’re merely decorative.
Vegetables are grown not to reward the eye so much as the taste buds. So while you might find corn stalks and bean bushes in the average vegetable garden, they’re not a common sight in a well designed landscape garden.
The greatest difficulties are practical ones. Although the leafy greens, like lettuce, can do fairly well on only four hours of direct sunlight a day, any vegetable that produces a fruit (tomatoes, beans, corn and so on) must have a solid eight hours of warming sun or its yields will be disappointing or virtually nonexistent; but that bright light does not benefit dwarf azaleas.
A proper soil mix is also important, along with the right fertilizer. It can be too much for some dwarf plants, however and can make them grow beyond the space they’re given. Plus, you need to turn the soil in your vegetable garden annually. This kind of tilling can’t be done in some small spaces.
This said, there is no doubting the fact that the smaller vegetables are worth trying, especially if space for the larger kind is at a premium. It is important to choose, however, the kind of smallness desired, whether it is the fruit or produce itself that will be miniature, or the plant that yields it. Miniature vegetables as such are amusing and eye-catching, a novelty that many restaurants and imaginative cooks offer with great success. Some miniatures, for example, cherry tomatoes, are accepted for their own sake, while a number of vegetables are of course just naturally small - radishes, for example.